The Editor, Sir:

This is an open letter to the Honourable Prime Minister, Mrs. Portia Simpson Miller: Greetings and good wishes.

I am what some would call a conservative evangelical Christian. I have been a minister of the church for well over 40 years. I have served numerous pastorates in our denomination across Jamaica and have been privileged to serve the Jamaica Association of Evangelicals as a vice-president for a number of years.

I have been a keen observer and even a participant in many of the various phases and changes to which the Church has been subjected, largely influenced by fringe elements and fanatical groups out of North America. Unfortunately, Jamaica is a most fertile field in which these aberrations of biblical and historic Christianity flourish.

Honourable Prime Minister, you only have to watch Religious Hard Talk hosted by Mr. Ian Boyne aired on TVJ on a Tuesday evening, to appreciate the magnitude of the religious jungle out there, competing for the hearts and minds of the simple and spiritually nave. The admonition of the holy scriptures to "contend for the faith once delivered to the saints" is never more urgent than it is today.

Honourable Prime Minister, you of all persons cannot afford to fall prey to any of these religious and spiritual extremists and self-appointed prophets in the land, for the simple reason that belief informs behaviour, and should you be persuaded to believe that you are God's 'sole-anointed' to the highest position of leadership over the people, and consequently vested with the divine right to rule, it would be a notion fraught with all kinds of dangers, both for yourself and the people of Jamaica.

It takes no prophet bearing a special message from heaven to predict that you may well win the next election and thus become the next Prime Minister of Jamaica. But you would have been no more "divinely called" and appointed by God than any of your predecessors - P.J. Patterson, Michael Manley, Edward Seaga - or for that matter, George Bush in the U.S., or Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, the consequences of the Iraq war and the atrocities in Zimbabwe notwithstanding.

People will make the choice

It is the people, Honourable Prime Minister, who will make the choice on election day, and the people may choose to elect Mr. Bruce Golding. To believe otherwise is to make a mockery of our democracy and to seek to reintroduce a form of theocracy that has its antecedent way back in the Old Testament history and today is irrelevant.

Honourable Prime Minister, I counsel you to tread cautiously with these prophecies emanating from these so-called prophets representing a small fringe element of the Church in Jamaica. Your endorsement of these 'prophets' could well send a wrong signal to right-thinking people in the society, including the wider church community. Finally, Honourable Prime Minister, should you or Bruce Golding be victorious at the polls (no credit to the prophet), the Church in Jamaica will stand with either of you in its continued intercessory ministry, for much wisdom and understanding and servant - leadership to the Jamaican people.

I am, etc.,

LLOYD H. SPENCER

4 1/2 Harwood Drive

Kingston 20